This news release is available in German. In order to invade healthy tissue, tumor cells must leave the actual tumor and enter the bloodstream or lymphatic system. For this purpose, they use certain enzymes, proteases that break down the tissue surrounding the tumor, thus opening the way for tumor cells to reach blood or lymphatic vessels. To keep the proteases in check, the body produces inhibitors such as the protein TIMP-1, which thwart the proteases in their work. But during development of metastases, the control function of this inhibitor appears not only to ...

HOUSTON – (Oct. 13, 2014) – New research from Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy found that states with a large minority population tend to incarcerate more people. According to lead author Katharine Neill, states with large African-American populations are more likely to have harsher incarceration practices, worse conditions of confinement and tougher policies toward juveniles compared with other states. She said these findings provide some support for long-standing arguments among sociology and criminal justice experts that the criminal ...

Recently, uncertainty has been getting a bad rap. Hundreds of articles have been printed over the last few years about how uncertainty brings negative effects to the markets and creates a drag on the economy at large. But a new study appearing in the February 2015 edition of the Journal of Consumer Research finds that uncertainty can be motivating. In "The Motivating-Uncertainty Effect: Uncertainty Increases Resource Investment in the Process of Reward Pursuit," Professors Ayelet Fishbach and Christopher K. Hsee of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and ...

Is matter falling into the massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way or being ejected from it? No one knows for sure, but a UC Santa Barbara astrophysicist is searching for an answer. Carl Gwinn, a professor in UCSB's Department of Physics, and colleagues have analyzed images collected by the Russian spacecraft RadioAstron. Their findings appear in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. RadioAstron was launched into orbit from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in July 2011 with several missions, one of which was to investigate the scattering of pulsars ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a new fusion protein found in approximately 15 percent of secondary glioblastomas or brain tumors. The finding offers new insights into the cause of this cancer and provides a therapeutic target for personalized oncologic care. The findings were published this month in the online edition of Genome Research. Glioblastoma is the most common and deadliest form of brain cancer. The majority of these tumors – known as primary glioblastomas – occur in the elderly without evidence ...

HOUSTON, Oct. 13, 2014 – According to a pair of University of Houston (UH) professors and their Italian colleague, while science is increasingly moving in the direction of teamwork and interdisciplinary research, changes need to be made in academia to allow for a more collaborative model to flourish. Professors Ioannis T. Pavlidis and Ioanna Semendeferi from UH and Alexander M. Petersen from the IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies in Italy published a commentary in the October 2014 issue of Nature Physics, articulating policies that will harmonize academic ...

Recent studies have found that crocodiles and their relatives are highly intelligent animals capable of sophisticated behavior such as advanced parental care, complex communication and use of tools for hunting. New University of Tennessee, Knoxville, research published in the journal Ethology Ecology and Evolution shows just how sophisticated their hunting techniques can be. Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor in UT's Department of Psychology, has found that crocodiles work as a team to hunt their prey. His research tapped into the power of social media ...

AUDIO: A study in The Journal of Cell Biology suggests that asynchronous regeneration of cells within muscle tissue leads to the development of fibrosis in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Listen... Click here for more information. Like a marching band falling out of step, muscle cells fail to perform in unison in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. A new study in The Journal of Cell Biology reveals how this breakdown leads to the proliferation of stiff fibrotic ...

Researchers at the University of Calgary's Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) and Southern Alberta Cancer Research Institute (SACRI) have made a discovery that could prolong the life of people living with glioblastoma – the most aggressive type of brain cancer. Samuel Weiss, PhD, Professor and Director of the HBI, and Research Assistant Professor Artee Luchman, PhD, and colleagues, published their work today in Clinical Cancer Research, which is leading researchers to start a human phase I/II clinical trial as early as Spring 2015. Researchers used tumour cells derived ...

CLIP2 serves as a radiation marker: After exposure to radiation from radioiodine, both the genetic activity and the protein expression are increased, as the scientists' studies were able to substantiate. CLIP2 appears to be particularly significant in the development of tumours in the thyroid gland after radiation exposure. The team around Martin Selmansberger, Dr. Julia Heß, Dr. Kristian Unger and Prof. Dr. Horst Zitzelsberger from the Radiation Cytogenetics Research Unit at the Helmholtz Zentrum München discovered a connection between high CLIP2 levels and ...

Substance abuse counselors and social workers often recommend recovering addicts establish new networks of non-using friends and supporters. But researchers at Case Western Reserve University's social work school found, for many women in poverty, it's not so easy to drop the users in their lives. Many are people that women depend on for childcare, transportation and other necessities to live. "People in the women's networks might be family members, parents or children, who also use drugs. It's hard to cut these people out of their lives," said Elizabeth M. Tracy, ...

Women who worry, cope poorly with stress and/or experience mood swings in middle age run a higher risk of developing Alzheimer disease later in life. This is the conclusion of a study carried out at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, that followed 800 women for nearly 40 years. The study, which will be published in the scientific journal Neurology, started in 1968 when 800 women in Gothenburg took a personality test that measured, among other things, their levels of neuroticism and extroversion. High Stress The women in the study stated whether they ...

Dental anxiety can be so extreme for some patients that a simple cotton swab on the gums makes them flinch. And others, fearful of pain, simply avoid seeing the dentist, according to a new study by Case Western Reserve University dental researchers on when and how to use sedatives during dental procedures. As a result, dentistry is responding with sedation techniques to make fearful and anxious patients more comfortable. For a master's thesis in endodontics, Madhavi Setty, DDS, MSD, set out to understand how dental specialties like endodontics for root canals, periodontics ...

The once-powerful Category 5 Typhoon Vongfong has fortunately weakened to a barely Category 1 typhoon as it approaches the big islands of Japan. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite and NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Vongfong on Oct. 11 and noticed the heaviest precipitation was north of the center. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed over Vongfong on Oct. 11 at 17:23 UTC (1:23 p.m. EDT) and captured an infrared image of the storm from the VIIRS instrument. The VIIRS instrument showed that the strongest thunderstorms that stretched highest in the atmosphere were in the ...

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Cyclone Hudhud as it was nearing east-central India's coastline on Oct. 11. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument aboard Aqua captured infrared data on the storm on Oct. 11 at 07:23 UTC (3:23 a.m. EDT) that showed cloud top temperatures had dropped, indicating stronger uplift and stronger thunderstorms. That's an indication that the storm has strengthened in the last day. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center noted that animated infrared satellite imagery shows the eye feature has become cloud filled while the overall structure ...

VIDEO: This animation of imagery from NOAA GOES-East satellite from Oct. 10-12 shows the movement of Tropical Storm Fay in the Atlantic an approaching cold front over the eastern US.... Click here for more information. Tropical Storm Fay is affecting Bermuda on Sunday, Oct. 12, but a cold front over the eastern U.S. is expected to absorb the storm over the next day or two. Both were seen in an image from NOAA's GOES-East satellite. On Saturday, Oct. 11, Tropical Depression 7 ...

Tropical Storm Gonzalo formed quickly on Oct. 12 just east of the Leeward Islands, triggering tropical storm warnings for many islands. NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured an image of the newborn storm on Sunday, Oct. 12, and Tropical Storm Fay northeast of Bermuda. The GOES East satellite is a geostationary satellite managed by NOAA. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland the NASA/NOAA GOES Project creates images and animations and today's visible image, taken at 2:45 p.m. EDT showed a smaller Gonzalvo east of the Leeward Islands while Fay was ...

The mutations were familiar, but the patients' conditions seemed baffling at first. A team lead by Rockefeller University researchers had linked variations in an immune gene to rare bacterial infections. Shortly afterward, Chinese scientists told them of three children in that country with mutated versions of the same gene. However, the Chinese children had no history of the severe bacterial infections. Instead, they had seizures and unusual calcium deposits deep in their brains. This discrepancy led to the discovery of an immune protein with paradoxical roles: It both ...

High-resolution cryo-electron microscopy has now revealed in unprecedented detail the structural changes in the bacterial ribosome which results in resistance to the antibiotic erythromycin. Multiresistant bacterial pathogens that are insensitive to virtually all available antibiotics are one of the major public-health challenges of our time. The question of how resistance to various antibiotics develops is the focus of research being carried out by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich biochemist Daniel Wilson and his colleagues. As they report in the journal ...

Scientists from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and UCL (University College London) have identified what they believe could be a cause of pre-term premature rupture of the fetal membrane (PPROM), which accounts for 40 per cent of pre-term births, and is the main reason for infant death world-wide. The researchers, whose work was funded by the charity Wellbeing of Women, used bioengineering techniques to test the effect of repetitive stretch on tissues of the amniotic membrane which surrounds and protects the baby prior to birth. They found that stretching of the ...

New York | Heidelberg, 13 October 2014 Increasing reliance on renewable energies is the way to achieve greater CO2 emission sustainability and energy independence. As such energies are yet only available intermittently and energy cannot be stored easily, most countries aim to combine several energy sources. In a new study in EPJ Plus, French scientists have come up with an open source simulation method to calculate the actual cost of relying on a combination of electricity sources. Bernard Bonin from the Atomic Energy Research Centre CEA Saclay, France, and colleagues demonstrate ...

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) have developed a new battery that can be recharged up to 70 per cent in only 2 minutes. The battery will also have a longer lifespan of over 20 years. Expected to be the next big thing in battery technology, this breakthrough has a wide-ranging impact on many industries, especially for electric vehicles which are currently inhibited by long recharge times of over 4 hours and the limited lifespan of batteries. This next generation of lithium-ion batteries will enable electric vehicles to charge 20 times ...

In the context of an aging population, the number of cases of people with multimorbidity, or multiple health conditions, is increasing, creating significant healthcare challenges. Now, the first comprehensive systematic review in this field has found higher levels of multimorbidity in women. Equally as importantly, it has revealed the poor quality of evidence on this increasingly critical area of healthcare. The review's main author, Professor Jose M Valderas, NIHR Clinician Scientist of the University of Exeter Medical School, is calling for better quality research to ...

Biomedical engineering researchers have developed a drug delivery system consisting of nanoscale "cocoons" made of DNA that target cancer cells and trick the cells into absorbing the cocoon before unleashing anticancer drugs. The work was done by researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "This drug delivery system is DNA-based, which means it is biocompatible and less toxic to patients than systems that use synthetic materials," says Dr. Zhen Gu, senior author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor in ...

Scientists at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg have published their findings that mutations in a gene known as "ARMC5" promote the growth of benign tumours in the adrenal glands and on the meninges: ARMC5 appears to belong to the group of so-called tumour suppressor genes. It is the first time in years that scientists have characterized such a gene. The ARMC5 gene was discovered by independent workgroups studying benign tumours – so-called adrenal adenomas – in connection with Cushing's syndrome. In this ...